The Messenger

About this Book

Shamron, as he entered the foyer, glanced at the mailbox for apartment number
three and saw it was absent a nameplate. He mounted the stairs and tramped
slowly upward. He was short of stature and was dressed, as usual, in khaki
trousers and a scuffed leather jacket with a tear in the right breast. His face
was full of cracks and fissures, and his remaining fringe of gray hair was
cropped so short as to be nearly invisible. His hands were leathery and
liver-spotted and seemed to have been borrowed from a man twice his size. In one
was the file.

The door was ajar when he arrived on the third-floor landing. He placed his
fingers against it and gently pushed. The flat he entered had once been
meticulously decorated by a beautiful Italian-Jewish woman of impeccable taste.
Now the furniture, like the beautiful Italian woman, was gone, and the flat had
been turned into an artists studio. Not an artist, Shamron had to remind
himself. Gabriel Allon was a restorerone of the three or four most sought-after
restorers in the world. He was standing now before an enormous canvas depicting
a man surrounded by large predatory cats. Shamron settled himself quietly on a
paint-smudged stool and watched him work for a few moments. He had always been
mystified by Gabriels ability to imitate the brushstrokes of the Old Masters.
To Shamron it was something of a parlor trick, just another of Gabriels gifts
to be utilized, like his languages or his ability to get a Beretta off his hip
and into firing position in the time it takes most men to clap their hands.

It certainly looks better than when it first arrived, Shamron said, but I
still dont know why anyone would want to hang it his home.

It wont end up in a private home, Gabriel said, his brush to the canvas.
This is a museum piece.

Who painted it? Shamron asked abruptly, as though inquiring about the
perpetrator of a bombing.

Bohnams auction house in London thought it was Erasmus Quellinus, Gabriel
said. Quellinus might have laid the foundations, but its clear to me that
Rubens finished it for him. He moved his hand over the large canvas. His
brushstrokes are everywhere.

What difference does it make?

About ten million pounds, Gabriel said. Julian is going to do very nicely
with this one.

Julian Isherwood was a London art dealer and sometime secret servant of
Israeli intelligence. The service had a long name that had very little to do
with the true nature of its work. Men like Shamron and Gabriel referred to it as
the Office and nothing more.

I hope Julian is giving you fair compensation.

My restoration fee, plus a small commission on the sale.

Whats the total?

Gabriel tapped his brush against his palette and resumed working.

We need to talk, Shamron said.

So talk.

Im not going to talk to your back. Gabriel turned and peered at Shamron
once more through the lenses of his magnifying visor. And Im not going to talk
to you while youre wearing those things. You look like something from my
nightmares.

Gabriel reluctantly set his palette on the worktable and removed his
magnifying visor, revealing a pair of eyes that were a shocking shade of emerald
green. He was below average in height and had the spare physique of a cyclist.
His face was high at the forehead and narrow at the chin, and he had a long bony
nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. His hair was cropped
short and shot with gray at the temples. It was because of Shamron that Gabriel
was an art restorer and not one of the finest painters of his generationand why
his temples had turned gray virtually overnight when he was in his early
twenties. Shamron had been the intelligence officer chosen by Golda Meir to hunt
down and assassinate the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Massacre, and a
promising young art student named Gabriel Allon had been his primary gunman.

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